


The Narrow Edge

by JupiterMelichios



Series: Gotham Ghoul [2]
Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics), Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Alternate Universe - Tokyo Ghoul, Crossover, Gen, Ghouls, Gotham City Police Department, Interrogation, Lies, POV Outsider, Police, Secret Identity, Tim Drake is Red Robin, Tim Drake's fake fingernail, Tim Drake-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:54:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21795649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JupiterMelichios/pseuds/JupiterMelichios
Summary: Harvey hates rich kids. He hates how smug they always are, how callous and ignorant. He hates that 90% of the time all their self satisfied belief in their own invincibility is true, because there’s always a rich daddy on the other end of the phone with bail money and lawyers and the commissioner’s phone number.Right now though he’s revising down his opinion on how awful most of the trust fund kids he deals with are, because fucking none of them have a patch on Timothy Jackson Drake-Wayne.
Relationships: Tim Drake/Jason Todd
Series: Gotham Ghoul [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1570584
Comments: 35
Kudos: 300





	The Narrow Edge

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from Cicero, who was a smug bastard and much to fond of the sound of his own voice, but very quotable. "So near is falsehood to truth that a wise man would do well not to trust himself on the narrow edge."
> 
> This isn't really anything - too long to be a ficlet, too insubstantial to be a real story, but I was in the mood to write an outsider perspective on how fucking weird and creepy Tim is if you don't know the whys of him, and this is what I ended up with. I hope you like it.

Harvey fucking hates rich kids. He hates how smug they always fucking are, how callous and fucking ignorant. He hates that 90% of the time all their self satisfied belief in their own invincibility is fucking true, because there’s always a rich daddy on the other end of the phone with bail money and crooked lawyers and the commissioner’s phone number. (Although not so much that last one, not since old Gordon got the post. He’s been frustrating the fuck outa all the rich shady assholes by refusing to like golf or take working lunches).

Right now though he’s revising down his opinion on how awful most of the trust fund kids he deals with are, because fucking none of them have a patch on Timothy Jackson Drake-Wayne.

It’s not just the double barrelled surname, or the fact that he’d turned up at the station wearing a suit, even though it’s a Saturday. Hell, it’s not even the fact that this asshole has a fucking corporate job at seventeen.

It’s the fact that this kid is clearly guilty as  _ sin _ , and he’s not even here as a suspect. He’s just a fucking witness. Harvey doesn’t even know what the fuck he’s guilty  _ of _ , just that it’s something big.

Okay firstly, no one actually burns off their fingerprints in chemistry class accidents, that’s just one of those fucking movie cliche lines, but this kid somehow has fucking evidence to back it up. After they’d spent way too fucking long trying to get even partial prints from his right hand, Harvey had gone and looked it up and what do you know, the Gazette ran a fucking story on it. “Child Millionnaire threatens to sue school over unsafe science room”. And the fact that it’s all legit just makes it worse, because it doesn’t change the fact that that’s not something that happens! All it proves is that this little psycho fucking melted his own fingers with acid in full view of all his rich asshole classmates, and then sued the school to give himself an alibi.

Then there’s the scars. So many fucking scars, and the kid probably thinks he hasn’t noticed, he’s been real careful to cover them all up with make-up, but Harvey is a fucking cop okay, and no matter what anyone might say he’s good at his job. He’s fucking observant and shit. And this creepy little bastard looks like someone pushed him into a mincing machine.

He’s missing a chunk from his left ear, and his knuckles are that special kind of crooked you only get if you’re a prize-fighter or a street tough. There’s a line across the palm of his right hand, that he’d tried to tell Harvey was from the same accident as his fucking finger-tips, but Harvey knows a friction burn when he sees it. Oh yeah, and lets not forget the fucking clincher - someone had cut this kids throat, clean and neat and almost surgical except that Harvey isn’t an idiot and he knows no doctor would cut sideways, right across the arteries. That’s a fucking murder scar, and there’s no convenient newspaper articles explaining how he walked  _ that  _ off.

But the worst thing, the fucking absolute  _ worst  _ thing, is the eye. According to the kid, it’s glass. Harvey hadn’t even asked, the kid had just seen him looking and volunteered the information, and Harvey  _ almost  _ believes him. There’s something unnatural about it, and the colour doesn’t match his other one. His normal eye is a dark slate blue, almost grey. Harvey’s first partner told him once that people with slate blue eyes are all oversexed, and he really doesn’t want to fucking think about that, not in relation to this fucking kid. But the other one is pure blue, so pale it looks like it came from a fucking baby. Adults don’t have eyes that colour, and he doesn’t want to fucking know why this kid picked it instead of a matching one. Except that he didn’t pick it, he couldn’t have, because Harvey is absolutely fucking certain he saw it move, out of the corner of his eye.

Not when he’s looking at it. As long as he’s facing the kid, it stays exactly as creepily immobile as glass eyes always do, but when he looks away…

Timothy Jackson Drake-Wayne is guilty as sin, and Harvey doesn’t need to know what of to be certain of that. This is a kid who belongs in the dock, not the witness stand. Preferably with four point restraints and one of those fucking Hannibal Lecture masks on.

“Lets go over this again, shall we?”

“Were the first three times not enough, Detective?”

If this kid were a little less rich (and a little less unsettling) he’d says ‘no, because your story is so full of holes you could use it as a fucking colander’, but he doesn’t want Bruce Wayne to suddenly decide to take an interest in his career, so he just grits his teeth and says, “Just want to make sure I have all the details correct, sir.”

The kid raises an eyebrow at him, like Harvey is the suspicious one in this situation. “Perhaps you should have made more detailed notes the first time, officer.”

Harvey looks down at his notes, mostly just so he’s not looking at the fucking kid, and he’d swear, he’d swear it under oath, that the ‘glass’ eye follows the movement.

“You misspelled Lecter, by the way,” the kid adds, and then he does this thing with his mouth that looks like a smile that got mugged and beat up on the way to his face.

Harvey reaches instinctively for his sidearm, but he doesn’t actually draw it. His notes are upside down and back to front for the kid, and Harvey’s handwriting is illegible even to him most of the time. He has no idea how the fuck the kid read them, but being a creepy little bastard isn’t enough to justify pulling his gun on him. At least not in an interrogation room.

What he wants to say is ‘if you’re a demon pretending to be a human boy, you have to tell me’. What he actually says is, “If you could just repeat your statement please,” but he makes the sign of the cross with his left hand as he does it. Neither of the boy’s eyes move, but he’s certain he saw it all the same.

“If you insist,” the kid says, and this time his smile is as nice as you could want, and as fake as Dolly Parton’s tits. It’s a smile that says ‘I was at home in bed on the night of the stabbing, officer’. ‘Of course I want to do anything I can do to help, officer’. ‘I had no idea he’d left me all this money, officer’. Harvey’s seen a lot of smiles like that, and they were all guilty of something. “I was in my office, alone, when the alarms went off. Ms Turner…”

“Your secretary.”

“My father’s secretary, technically. She burst in to say that there were armed intruders in the building.

“There are panic rooms attached to mine and my father's offices ever since Two-Face’s attack a few years back. I unlocked it…”

“But didn't go in yourself.” They have Mrs Turner’s sworn statement that Drake insisted she go in alone, because he wanted to see if he could do anything to help. It sounds fake, but she hadn’t struck Harvey as a dishonest woman. The kid’s statement lines up with hers exactly, but then he’s a lying little snake if ever Harvey met one.

The boy gives him a lizard stare, slow and assessing and dispassionate, like he's weighing up whether to eat Harvey.

The last person to look at Harvey like that had been Poison Ivy and Harvey had been fucking glad when she escaped because being in the same building as her had made his skin creep. Psychos like Joker and Tally-Man he can deal with just fine. They’re just evil, plain and simple, and it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference whether they’re humans or ghouls, because evil doesn’t discriminate. But Ivy isn’t evil, not really. She kills people and chops them up and eats them, but she isn’t evil, just terribly, unavoidably, inhuman, and that’s a whole lot harder to deal with.

This kid had walked through the RC scanners in reception without setting off so much as a beep, but he’s looking at Harvey the same way she had.

Then fast as blinking the look is gone, and the kid is giving him a rueful smile, only the not-glass eye showing him to be anything other than just another normal boy. “I suppose I have to tell you this, since you clearly aren’t buying my story even a little bit, but I’d appreciate it if you kept it to yourself.”

“That depends on what you tell me.”

“I did try to get into the panic room, but Ms Turner slammed the door before I could.” 

“And you didn’t tell me this before why exactly?”

The kid does a pretty good ‘sincere and honest’, Harvey has to give him that. “I didn’t want her to get into trouble. If my father found out… He’s not known for his temper, but that might be a step too far even for him.”

“Why are you protecting someone who left you to die?”

“She was frightened. She acted on impulse. She…” He looks down at his hands, folded together on the table in front of him. “When I was first living with Bruce, when I was thirteen, I used to go along to WI with him because I didn’t like being home alone. She would always bring in candy on the days when she knew I was coming. I was… a difficult kid, but she made the effort anyway.”

“You realise giving false evidence is a very serious offence?”

“I don’t think you understand what a small gesture like that can mean to a lonely child, Detective.”

Reason says there’s no way this reptile of a boy would purger himself for the sake of someone else, but Harvey’s instincts are telling him that there’s at least some truth in the boy’s story. “Alright, I understand. You appreciate that I will need to take the rest of your statement again, under the circumstances?”

“Of course, although there really isn’t much to tell. When I realised that I was not getting into the panic room, I hid. I had no way of knowing whether this attack was targeted at me or my father, or at WI generally, or if the building had been picked at random. Bruce is a very public figure within Gotham, and it’s not usual for him to receive death threats and the like. I know I should have tried to help, but there was a reasonable chance that I or my family were being targeted. I was scared.”

“Quite understandable, Mr Wayne. Where did you hide?”

“There’s a bathroom attached to my office with a door that locks. I took a paperweight from my desk that seemed like the only thing in the room which could conceivably be used as a weapon, and I locked myself in there. I didn’t come out until GCPD officers came to tell us it was now safe.”

“So you just hid, for three hours?”

“Is that really so hard to believe, Detective?”

Yes, because every word out of your mouth is a lie. Because being in the same room as you feels like watching a horror movie. Because you’ve got no finger-prints and knuckles like a boxer and you’ve been reading my notes upside down and back to front. “Not at all, sir. I just wanted to confirm the time frame. Did you do anything, while you were in there?”

“I texted my boyfriend to tell him I loved him. I didn’t want to call in case someone heard me.”

“And your boyfriend is?” Harvey tries to imagine what sort of person would be attracted to a snake like this, and then he remembers the money. Some air-headed gold-digger, probably, with an eye for the main chance and not enough brains to know when to run.

“Not connected with any of this. I am happy to show you the texts, but I would prefer not to tell you his name and you have no reason to insist, unless you have evidence which suggests we were involved in some way which you do not. Our relationship is not public, and given my position I’m sure you can understand why I’d prefer to keep it that way for now.”

Harvey really wants to push it, but like the kid says, he doesn't have grounds. Not that that really matters, most of the time, but the kid is a Wayne, and that means Harvey's on thin fucking ice even questioning him. “If you wouldn't mind showing me the texts, just for completeness.”

Wordlessly the boy flicks through his phone and slides it across the desk to Harvey.

“For the record, Mr Drake-Wayne has handed me his phone, showing a series of messages between him and his boyfriend, which I will read aloud for the tape.

“Message from Jay, Timestamp July 3rd, 11:47 am. ‘Saw on news WI being attacked. Are you okay?’. Response from Mr Drake-Wayne, timestamp 11:49, ‘I’m okay at the moment, I’m hiding. I want you to know that I really love you, in case something happens.’ Response from J, also at 11:49, ‘Don’t say that, you’re going to be fine. I love you too.’”

Out of interest, and because he could, Harvey scrolled up and down in the message thread, but there was nothing incriminating. No request for an alibi, only a reminder from Drake that his boyfriend was out of milk, and a photo of a dog his boyfriend had met while out jogging. Normal human things.

Every instinct Harvey has is telling him it’s all fake, that it’s a cover for something, but he doesn’t have anything to go on except a hunch and an eye that isn’t glass.

“Three of the perps say they were attacked. Exact identity is unknown, but based on the descriptions I’d wager it was a Robin.” It’s a weak attempt at a gotcha, but Harvey isn’t feeling his best, not with this fucking kid making his balls creep, and it’s not like there’s anyone in Gotham who doesn’t have a strong opinion on the Bats, be it good or bad. It’s worth a try.

The boy doesn’t even blink. “That’s a risk they should have considered when they decided to commit a very public crime in the middle of Gotham. I don’t see what that has to do with me.”

“Oh nothing, I just thought you might have seen him.”

That gets him another of those bland plausible-deniability-is-my-middle-name smiles that make Harvey’s knuckles itch with the urge to punch something. “How could I? I was in the bathroom.”

“My mistake. I…” 

Harvey’s voice trails off, because the boy has just removed one of his fingernails. Literally just popped it off, like a snapper. Underneath, where there should be blood and flesh, there’s an empty space. Somehow that’s even more sickening than the blood would have been. Harvey can’t look away, compelled by the sheer nauseating horror of it, even as he feels bile begin to rise sour and acidic at the back of his throat. “I…”

The boy smiles at him, and this time he’s not even trying to pretend to be a real boy. His eyes are cold and hard and there’s no disguising the fact that the ‘glass’ one is moving as he watches Harvey watch him. “Is something the matter, Detective?”

Harvey glances up at his face and when he looks back down, the nail is back in place. “I thought…”

The smile gets wider. Sharks smile like that. The worst kinds of Ghouls smile like that. Humans don’t. “You thought what, exactly?”

“You’re screwing with me.”

“Undeniably. But the last time I checked, that wasn’t a crime. Not for people who look like me, anyway.”

“So you admit…”

“I admit I was being deliberately antagonistic. That doesn’t change the fact that my testimony was the truth. I just don’t like police officers much.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Apart from the well-documented corruption problems within the GCPD? Alright, how about Tamika Brown? Noel Waters? Simon Park? Are they reason enough?”

The first two names mean nothing to Harvey, but Simon Park's case is still all over the news. Ghoul who tried to use the subway. Cop on the station heard the RC detector go off, panicked, and shot the thing dead. Technically a breach of protocol, Gotham doesn’t have shoot on sight laws for ghouls like Florida, but everyone sane agreed it had been the right call.

Unfortunately the thing had been young, looked like a kid, so of course the press had had a fucking field day, and then that had attracted a load of ghoul rights activist bleeding heart hippies, and the whole thing has been one long PR shit show for the GCPD.

“You with one of those ‘Ghouls are just misunderstood’ groups?”

“As heir to the Wayne fortune I would never do something so controversial. Let's just say I have an interest in the cause and leave it at that.” Which is as good as admitting he’s got something to hide.

He came in through the scanners, Harvey reminds himself. No way he could have faked that.

“An interest, huh?”

“Is that a problem, Detective? As far as I'm aware, having an interest in charitable organisations is not a crime.”

“It isn't. But when the case I'm investigating involves an attack on humans by ghouls, it certainly counts as relevant information.”

“I believe Ghouls should have protection under the law. That does not mean I believe they should be free to commit acts of terrorism and it especially dies not mean I think they should be allowed to eat my staff. My father has had to make deeply painful visits to the families of those killed. I have funerals to attend. Some of those killed, I knew personally. I know that you are suspicious of me, and I can't blame you for that. But I had nothing to do with this.”

He doesn't try to look innocent, thank God, but his posture is open and easy, his eyes guarded but not aggressive. It’s one of the most convincing displays of honesty Harvey has ever seen. It’s also fake as shit, or Harvey’s the pope.

Harvey has no reason to keep him here. The boy is definitely guilty, but probably not of this.

“Alright sir, thank you for your time. You're free to go.”

He makes a show of turning off the recorder, and just as the boy gets to the door he says, “Just one more thing. Off the record this time.”

The boy gives him a completely unconvincing smile. “Of course.”

“What are you?”

That gets him something he thinks might be the only genuine smile of the whole interview. It's small and sharp and dangerous, like crushed glass in your pie. “Do you know what a Green Room is, Detective Bullock? In television it's where performers wait before going on camera. In the scrapper trade it's where the meat waits to be sent into the arena. Some of the scrappers are muzzled, either because they're dangerous or because it excites their owners. Some are chained up; the feral ones, the ones who've lost everything except the instinct to kill.

“Most aren't restrained in aren't way. Free to talk if they want to. Only the very new and the very experienced bother. The new because they haven't learned that killing someone you know is harder, the experiences because there's a point you reach where that isn't true anymore. Where killing to survive becomes so commonplace that even killing old friends is easy.”

Jesus Christ, no wonder the kid is fucked up. “Did you reach that point?”

“I have never been any good at small talk Detective. In my experience, talking to people usually makes them more inclined to kill me than less.”

“And you still support ghoul rights?”

The boy shrugs. “I know that species isn't enough to make a monster. Goodbye Detective. I wish you luck with your investigation.”

**Author's Note:**

> Without comments, there is no fic


End file.
